As flies to wanton boys....

What is it about mobile telephones?

Why do they have this overwhelming instinct to seek out fluids??

We've all heard stories, haven't we, of people dropping them down the loo? (I had a girl once cite such an accident as an excuse for having ducked out of a date with me. Who knows, it may have been true.) My great Bar School drinking buddy, the Mooting Partner, once knocked hers right across a bar counter in Hampstead so that it fell into the slop tray under a beer tap on the other side (the barman had just that second taken the cover off, preparatory to emptying the slops). We were all so paralysed with mirth that we didn't retrieve it from its sour-beer dunking for several seconds. I doubt if it was ever restored to usefulness.

I just dropped my phone into a cup of tea. Yes, not beer, tea. Oh, the irony!

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

There is no good time for this to happen. But when I have an interview for a new job tomorrow, am waiting for word on two others imminently, have recently added several potentially important numbers to the memory (and which, of course, I have not yet got around to making any other record of!), and am in the throes of attempting to renew passport, visa, and the lease on my apartment over the next week or two.... and have so much work on this week that I will have absolutely no chance to try to buy a replacement until the weekend..... well, this is something considerably more than merely inconvenient.

"Why me, God, why ME?" wails an unjustly put-upon Job.

Thunder rolls like laughter around the heavens, and far, far off we fancy we can hear The Invisible Sky Father guffawing to himself, "Because thou art an easy target!"